Once More, With Feeling
by snarryvader81
Summary: "We're opera mad in Camelot; we sing from the diaphragm a lot." Camelot is hit by a musical curse, and no one's happy about it. Merthur slash


Lancelot sighed and slumped down on the nearest soft surface, thoroughly exhausted. Through the window, he saw that it was just breaking dawn, which meant he hadn't had a wink of sleep in over twenty four hours.

He'd spent the previous night and early morning on an oh-so-thrilling stomp through the muddy woods with Merlin, searching for a demonic-looking little creature called an Imp. There hadn't been any physical signs of its presence to be found, but they'd both known it had to have been close, considering every time they turned around, they were missing a personal possession, little obstacles were suddenly appearing in their paths to trip them, or articles of their clothing had somehow been switched between them (Merlin had looked ridiculously swamped in his jacket, while he knew that the boy's red neckerchief couldn't have been flattering on him as turban).

Imps, according to Gaius, thrived off of one thing: prank pulling. It was their sole function in life.

Usually, these pranks were not malicious in nature, just aggravating. However, Camelot's citizens had suddenly been affected en-masse by a particularly bizarre enchantment that, while not life threatening, was disruptive and potentially dangerous nonetheless.

It had started one night at dinner in the hall, when Merlin had stumbled on his way to refill Arthur's goblet, hit the ground face-first, and spilled wine everywhere. Gwen had rushed to help him up and dry him off, but somewhere in the midst of it, her words suddenly turned musical.

For the next several minutes, she explained to everyone present, via song, that whenever she was feeling bad, she'd simply "think of her favorite things" (like copper kettles, mittens, kittens, and snowflakes) and it would help.

Immediately afterwards, as the hall had hesitantly begun applauding at the impromptu entertainment, Gwen had looked both confused and humiliated at the same time. She'd told him and Merlin later that she certainly hadn't been singing of her own free will, and that the song itself wasn't even something she'd ever heard before—it was more like a collection of her thoughts set to music and made to rhyme.

Understandably, they'd been concerned and had taken it to Gaius, hoping that he could discern whether or not Gwen had been enchanted. However, the next morning at breakfast, Arthur had suddenly stood up and, with King Uther looking on, broke into song about how he just could not _wait_ to be King. Merlin had joined him in a few verses, and Geoffrey of Monmouth had sung back at him, chastising his attitude and suggesting that it might be time for them to have a heart to heart.

Arthur's only reply to that had been, "kings don't need advice from old librarians, for a start."

From that little incident, they had gathered that it _was_ some sort of enchantment, but that it obviously wasn't just affecting Gwen. In fact, it seemed to be affecting _everybody_.

The halls of the castle rang with song twenty four hours a day. The streets were host to impressively choreographed dance routines as everyone joined in the same musical numbers. The training field became more of a stage, especially once Arthur started singing about how he was going to "make men out of them" every day. It would've been amusing if he hadn't also called them spineless and pathetic each time, too.

The highlights of the day, however, were undoubtedly meals. Not one went by without a performance.

One day the knights (including Lancelot, embarrassingly enough) all jumped on the tables and broke into a simultaneous song in which the end of each sentence rhymed with 'Camelot' and concluded with Sir Bors's solo of "I have to push the pram a lot!"

The next day at lunch, Uther stood up, sung a list of everything he'd done that day, and followed each task with the phrase, "like a boss." Lancelot still didn't really get what he meant by that, but the youth of Camelot now had a new slang term.

The day after that, Arthur stood up and declared his undying love for Merlin in a song that really made him come off as just a little bit . . . creepy. (Merlin's love was, apparently, much better than any drug could ever be and took away all of Arthur's emotional pain.)

Merlin then followed up with a song declaring his love to Arthur that made the previous one sound positively sane by comparison. (Loving him was, apparently suicide, but he was going to do it anyway, as he couldn't breathe when Arthur wasn't around.)

Gwaine proceeded to break into a song most everyone had since dubbed "Artie's Guy", in which he also declared his love for Merlin, and mourned the fact that he would always be pining, as he was with Arthur.

When Uther protested all of this, his face an alarming shade of purple as he yelled about how he wouldn't have his son committing sodomy with a servant, Arthur tried to scream—but ended up singing—back that Uther should stop being a drag and just be a Queen, because there was nothing he could do about it—Arthur had just been born this way.

Following that came the most elaborate dinner production they'd ever seen. Sirs Leon and Percival kicked it off, with the former moaning off-key about Arthur's romance with Merlin and how the thirty nine Knights of Camelot were soon going to be only thirty eight. From there, random diners began making rhythmic, almost hypnotic sounds that eventually turned into a chant of nonsense words.

Gwen then joined in above the rest, stepping up between Arthur and Merlin and swaying in time with the sound effects as she sang the chorus. Which, actually, compared to some of the other songs they'd heard, wasn't so bad. It was actually a bit soothing, like a lullaby.

_Can you feel the love tonight?_

_The peace the evening brings_

_The world for once in perfect harmony_

_with all it's living things_

_Can you feel the love tonight?_

_You needn't look too far_

_Stealing through the night's uncertainties_

_Love is where they are_

By the final chorus, almost everyone had either joined in the chanting or started tapping their silverware against their plates and goblets, creating a beat. For a minute, it was almost magical, but of course, Leon and Percival had to ruin it by ending the song with the conclusion that Arthur's carefree days were over and he was thus doomed. They then proceeded to sob hysterically on each other's shoulders. (Arthur beat them especially hard the next day at training for 'embarrassing him', when honestly, they'd only really embarrassed themselves.)

One day at the tavern, a barmaid and a stable boy took turns slapping Gwaine as they sang a duet about how he was a "beautiful liar" who wasn't even worth fighting over. (In love with Merlin? Possibly. Waiting for him? Hell. No.)

Some of the older women in the castle gathered around Merlin an afternoon when he was watching training and expressed to him in song the traits through which he could bring honor to the Kingdom as a future . . . Queen? Consort? Prince? They weren't really sure which word to use, but it didn't hamper them much in their song. (Privately, Lancelot thought that "calm", "obedient", and a "face paced" worker were all sort of the antithesis of Merlin, and somehow, he didn't think that he would be bearing any sons, ever.)

Lady Morgana led them all in a song that exposed the depravity that seemingly every member of court seemed have gotten up to last Friday night (the Lady herself woke up with a stranger in her bed, Arthur and Merlin went skinny dipping, Gwen danced on tabletops and took too many shots, Gwaine got thrown out of a tavern that Gaius later woke up smelling like, an alarming number of knights went streaking, and most startlingly, Uther had a ménage a trois.)

That right there was when the enchantment stopped being merely 'annoying' and verged into 'dangerous'. Whenever a song took hold and forced its way out of someone's mouth, they said what was truly on their mind, with no capacity for lies or half-truths. And while that was okay when it came to declaring love, bitching about your friend's new relationship, or describing all your favorite things, it got a little sticky when you started relating sexual scandals and drinking problems.

Of course, Merlin and Gaius still hadn't made any progress in even determining who had cast the enchantment in the first place, so things had to continue as they were, disaster bound or not.

During one training session, all the knights burst into a number about the kind of women they wanted (pretty, fawning, and a good cook were the three most desired traits; Merlin's suggestion of intelligent and free-willed was met with scoffs.) Later at dinner, Uther and Arthur stood up and bared their souls to each other in an extremely emotional duet; Arthur revealed that sometimes he wanted to cry when he saw that he and Uther weren't quite the way other fathers and sons were, while Uther sang that he frequently wished to God that he'd been the one to die instead of Ygraine. In the end, they'd concluded that they couldn't have ever known they'd come to love each other so much, and that each meant the world to the other.

Following that, Arthur had locked himself in his chambers and refused to leave for days, too humiliated to even show his face. (Uther, on the other hand, had coped by ordering a slew of executions that he personally presided over. Blood always did cheer him up.)

The Prince finally did reemerge, but only after Merlin thoroughly embarrassed himself by serenading him outside his door with a song about how he "wanted to have his babies". (Lancelot had had to think about that one for a while—was there something Merlin wasn't telling him? Was it a sorcerer thing? Was he just delusional? Whatever way, it was fairly disturbing.)

Thankfully, no one but Lancelot and Gaius heard Merlin's next song, in which he proclaimed that truly happy nations could never be ruled by one man alone. Uther would've undoubtedly had his head chopped off for it.

During a diplomatic session with an ambassador from the North, Arthur embarrassed the entire kingdom by abruptly asking Merlin, in fairly graphic lyrics, what it would take to . . . become more intimately acquainted with him. Merlin replied with a catchy tune about how if Arthur liked it, he should put a ring on it. The Ladies of the court served as his backup dancers, all of them holding their left hands aloft.

Morgana sang a loud, rebellious song about her "prerogative" (which apparently involved not needing Uther's permission to make her own decisions), while Gwen, upon seeing the first snow begin outside, preformed quite a beautiful, yet morbid, ballad about winter and the mass death it brought upon the world. She later did a duet with Merlin about their close friendship, though Gwen included a rather scathing lyric about how she felt he was becoming nothing more than "sand beneath Arthur's shoes."

During a meeting of the council, Arthur made up for his earlier sentimentalism by expressing to his father a different facet of his feelings for him—that he felt that Uther was holding him too tightly for fear of losing control of him, and that all Arthur really wanted was be "more like me and less like you." (The King had not been pleased.)

Later on in the day, he followed up with an angrily sung warning to Gwaine to "think twice before you touch my future Queen/Prince/Consort." Merlin had tried to diffuse the situation with a song proclaiming how truly, madly, and deeply in love he was with Arthur, but it didn't work.

It was around that time that Lancelot noticed that the enchantment seemed to be growing more pervasive. Previously, each person had broken into song and dance about only once a day, but now everyone was doing it for seemingly every conversation. You couldn't walk through the market without hearing a jumbled mass of lyrics about every conceivable subject.

So, out of rapidly increasing desperation, Merlin had dragged Lancelot out into a remote field to accompany him as he summoned the dragon to try to get some advice.

Kilgharrah had promptly sung at him that he was "standing on the edge of a silver future" and that he would like to "stick him on the lip of forever," whatever the hell that meant. Luckily for them, however, he did finally get on with some advice giving, suggesting in iambic pentameter that they should start looking for an Imp.

As they walked back to the castle, Merlin had sourly said—in an actual, normal, non-rhyming speaking voice—that he didn't think the dragon was actually affected by the enchantment; he'd just put on a show to annoy him.

Be that as it may, Gaius—in between relating to Merlin in verse that he desperately needed some sleep—found an entry on Imps in one of his bestiaries, from which he determined there were two ways to end the enchantment: convince the thing, somehow, to lift it, or just kill it.

Merlin's response had been a song with only one lyric repeated over and over again: "Let the bodies hit the floor."

He and Lancelot had agreed to meet after dinner that night in the city and head out into the woods to try to find it, as, according to Gaius, the things liked to live under rocks or in decaying logs in coniferous forests.

Fortunately, this meant that if all went well, they were only going to have to endure one last meal with random outbursts of off-key shrieking.

_Un_fortunately, it seemed that Merlin and Morgana had been selected as that night's entertainment.

They'd entered the dining hall at roughly the same time, Merlin trailing a few paces behind Arthur like the submissive servant he most assuredly wasn't, and Morgana strutting a few paces in front of Gwen, looking every inch the haughty mistress she most assuredly was.

Their eyes had met by happenstance when Morgana had glanced over at Arthur and Merlin had glanced over at Gwen. They both froze in place, gazes locked and expressions icy; Merlin's lips had pulled down into a frown while Morgana's twisted up into a scowl.

Lancelot looked between them, suddenly uneasy. He'd been aware, vaguely, that the two weren't on the best of terms anymore, but suddenly the hate between them was almost a palpable thing, hanging there in air as they stared.

"_Well, no one told me about her_," Merlin began, hushed, eyes hooded and expression dark. "_The way she lied. Well, no one told me about her, how many people cried._"

Morgana's hands clenched at her sides. "_But it's too late to say you're sorry_," she spat, voice wavering. "_How would I know? Why should I care? Please don't bother trying to find her—she's not there." _

Silence descended, heavy and awkward. Merlin and Morgana glowered and finally turned on their heels and exited in opposite directions, leaving the rest of them to wonder. Neither of them came back to the hall that night, but afterwards, Lancelot did find the latter at their appointed meeting place. He didn't say anything about what had happened for quite a while, staying stonily silent as they made their way through the snowy town square. The peasants were in the midst of a group performance of a song about how the most loverly thing right now would be a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair.

"Oh, please," Merlin muttered, his bad mood coming to the forefront.

Lancelot couldn't help but smile slightly. "They're just cold, Merlin. How would you feel if you had to sleep on the floor with the dogs to stay warm?"

"Throw in some chickens and dirt and it'd be just like home."

Oh, right. Being the Crown Prince's personal servant meant that Merlin lived fairly comfortably in Camelot, but he did seem to recall that he was from a farming village the next kingdom over.

It had begun snowing heavily by the time they entered the forest, and though the trees did provide some shelter, they were still freezing, wet, and miserable as they searched.

"I'm blowing this thing up when we find it," Merlin hissed under his breath, his teeth clanging and his shoulders shaking. "Just like Nimueh . . ."

Lancelot would've been curious about who Nimueh was (and why the hell Merlin had _blown her up_) but he was already itching to ask a different question:

"What was that with Lady Morgana tonight?"

Merlin burrowed down into his brown jacket, frowning. He didn't look pleased with the question, but still he waited for him to answer, counting each of his breaths by the white puffs appearing between his lips.

It took ten of them before he answered.

"She's a witch."

Lancelot stilled, disbelieving. "A _witch_? That can't—Uther's own ward can't have magic!"

"She has it just like I do."

"But—but then—if that's truly the case—shouldn't it have pushed you closer together? Not driven you apart?"

Merlin snorted derisively, but his expression quickly mellowed. "It's my own fault. I knew she had magic before she even did, but I did nothing until it was too late. And then so soon after that, Morgause . . ."

"Morgause?"

He shook his head, eyes dropping to his feet as they crunched over snow and dead leaves. "I'll stop at nothing to see Arthur on the throne. Everything I've done since I've come to Camelot has been with that goal in mind. That puts me at odds with Morgana."

"Why?"

"Because she'll stop at nothing to see _herself_ on the throne."

Lancelot sucked in a sharp breath. "Are you saying Morgana is _plotting_ against Arthur?"

He nodded. "And I . . . I'm afraid I might've given her just what she needs to be successful . . ."

"What do you mean?"

"There was a child, a druid boy, who was trapped in the city after Uther had his father executed for sorcery. Gwen and Morgana and I . . . we hid him. But the dragon warned me against it. He told me to let the boy die."

"Why?"

He ignored the question. "Morgana bonded with him so tightly, with no explanation. But now I know . . . that their fates are as intertwined as Arthur's and mine. The prophecy the dragon made . . ."

"Merlin—" he tried, but the enchantment seemed to have decided that he had spoken too many words normally. His expression dark, he began humming—a soft, almost gentle melody, but it carried an undertone of such black despair that it seemed almost impossible it could be coming from Merlin's mouth.

And was that his imagination, or were his eyes glowing just slightly gold?

_Hush child, the darkness will rise from the deep and_

_carry you down into sleep_

_Child, the darkness will rise from the deep and_

_carry you down into sleep_

_Guileless son, I'll shape your belief_

_and you'll always know that my father's a thief_

_And you won't understand the cause of your grief_

_but you'll always follow the voices beneath_

_Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty, loyalty only to me_

_Guileless son, your spirit will—_

He fell silent abruptly, his mouth snapping shut as his body went stiff. It was the first time Lancelot had seen anyone stop in the middle of a song—he hadn't even known it was possible.

The knight followed Merlin's gaze down to the jagged hole on the side of a log a few feet away from them, sitting surrounded by rotting leaves and underbrush.

Where he found that he was being stared at by a set of very small, very beady red eyes.

Merlin promptly flailed, jumped up, and set the log on fire.

Unfortunately, the Imp was quicker, barreling out the end of the log and fleeing through the trees.

"Oh _no_ you _don't_!" Merlin shouted, taking off after it. Lancelot drew his sword and followed him.

Two hours later, after several near-catastrophic forest fires had been lit, hypothermia and frostbite were on the verge of setting in, and Merlin had tripped over almost every root in his path, the Imp was finally cornered.

Seemingly sensing that the sorcerer that had it trapped was not in a good mood, the ugly little thing bawled and demanded to know what was so bad about a little music curse.

At which point, Merlin broke into his grand finale: a paradoxical song that began with the lyric "words like violence break the silence", went on the deride words for being harmful, meaningless and forgettable, and ended with him proclaiming that all he wished to do was "enjoy the silence."

The Imp was then destroyed in the manner Merlin had earlier promised—he summoned down a lightning storm and blew it to pieces.

He turned to him immediately afterwards, covered in Imp splatter, and asked:

"Do you . . . at all . . . feel the urge to break into song?"

Smiling widely, he shook his head in a firm 'no', and couldn't even find it in him to wince when Merlin threw his arms around him and spread the gore.

They walked back to a wonderfully, beautifully, _magnificently _silent city, and an even quieter castle, where they parted ways—Merlin to the court physician's quarters, and Lancelot to the knights' barracks.

He now finally lay in bed, in fresh, Imp-guts-free clothes, and watched the sun peak over the horizon. A part of his mind was still thrumming loudly with all he'd learned about Morgana, but he was too exhausted to dwell, or even worry. All he was capable of was closing his eyes, dampening his thoughts, and taking Merlin's advice:

_Enjoy the silence._

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Author's Note: Needless to say, this was inspired by and named for the Buffy episode. After all: Giles = Uther.

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Songs Used (in order of appearance):

"My Favorite Things" – Julie Andrews (from "The Sound of Music")

"I Just Can't Wait To Be King" – from "The Lion King"

"I'll Make a Man Out of You" – from "Mulan"

"Knights of the Round Table" – from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

"Like A Boss" – The Lonely Island

"Better Than Drugs" – Skillet

"Suicide" – Rihanna

"Jesse's Girl" – Rick Springfield

"Born This Way" – Lady GaGa

"Can You Feel The Love Tonight?" – from "The Lion King"

"Beautiful Liar" – Beyonce and Shakira

"Honor To Us All" – from Mulan

"Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" – Katy Perry

"A Girl Worth Fighting For" – from "Mulan"

"I Didn't Know I'd Love You So Much" – Anthony Head and Alexa Vega (from "Repo! The Genetic Opera")

"I Wanna Have Your Babies" – Natasha Bedingfield

"Happy Nation" – Ace of Base

"Inside of You" – Hoobastank

"Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" – Beyonce

"My Prerogative" – Britney Spears

"Ice Queen" – Within Temptation

"Bells For Her" – Tori Amos

"Numb" – Linkin Park

"Think Twice" – Eve 6

"Truly Madly Deeply" – Cascada

"Silver Future" – Monster Magnet

"I Need Some Sleep" – Eels

"Bodies" – Drowning Pool

"About Her" – Malcolm Mclaren

"Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" – from "My Fair Lady"

"Mordred's Lullaby" – Heather Dale

"Enjoy the Silence" – Lacuna Coil


End file.
